Workshop Reports
Water Machines Devices for the River Environment Enhancement
GAETANO DE FRANCESCO DFR Architecture
GERDI PAPA POLIS University
ERIONA CANGA POLIS University
Climate changes represent an emblematic condition of the rapidly evolving reality. Designing uncertainty and nonnormativity is a necessary assumption of contemporary architectural, landscape, and urban design. The ever-changing water dynamics, in various ways connected to climate changes and the arising water emergency, continuously change the geographies of the territories and the conditions of the urban spaces. The necessity to face up to this contemporary crisis can be an occasion to create more ecological, sustainable and resilient urban environments.Water Machine Workshop investigates this contemporary condition. From 25th to 28th September 2019, during the event Tirana Design Week 2019, it involved 35 students of Polis University in the design of new infrastructural scenarios able to deal with the water dynamics of the Aniene river habitat. First, second, third, and fourth-year students of Architecture and Urban Planning Courses develop several proposals to reuse a series of urban voids in the East side of Rome, along the Aniene River, the affluent of Tiber. The belief that moves the workshop is that in Rome, as in other major cities of the world, urban voids and brown areas currently trapped inside the built cities -, represent a resource to redirect the urban development: from urban expansion and the continuous consumption of agricultural land to the reuse of the existing heritage. The regeneration of these areas, capillary diffused in the contemporary cities, has the power not only to
26
FORUM A+P
22
January 2021
redevelop isolated parts of the city, but, if linked by new networks, also to create new generation infrastructures for the governance and qualification of the urban territory: infrastructures able to facing up climate change through systems of slowing down and recycling urban water, providing sustainable mobility in the city, ecological corridors, oxygenation and greening systems; infrastructures that bring together the new information cloud in models that can be transformed into rapid choices on the environment, infrastructures which determine an active sense of citizenship and civic participation.These infrastructures are the necessary driving force for the progressive transformation of entire urban sectors according to the principles of sustainability and resilience in the use of resources and in an increasingly widespread circularity that is transformed from a principle of the economy to the principle of a broader vision. Recognizing the fundamental role that infrastructures play in the city, the reuse of the empty spaces can give life to a network of small-scale infrastructural projects able to manage water dynamics and, at the same time to regenerate urban spaces. Thinking of many small infrastructures distributed in the territory in the case of urban flooding, water, and waste treatment, and for the energy production is equivalent to limited and more sustainable impacts, to construction times and limited costs and greater safety in as their simultaneous failure is certainly less likely. It is what many contemporary
